There are numerous well known techniques for the manufacture of molded products; however, where it may be desired for such products to be joined to one another such as an interconnected strip of plastic sealing gaskets which are joined such that they may be installed using continuous operational means, a two step process is required. First, an extruded sheet of material is produced, and then a secondary die cutting operation is performed to stamp out the selected gasket design. While the scrap from the secondary die cutting operation can be recovered and re-used in subsequent extrusion operations, this is very costly, time consuming and inefficient. Continuous molding profile techniques cannot be used alone for such a product since the processing techniques deal only with the cross-sectional shape or profile of the product to be produced. Injection molding is not possible since the molds must be opened and the product removed after each molding operation, thus making it impossible to produce an interconnected strip of molded products. Certain endless and rotary extrusion techniques have been employed for the manufacture of molded parts; however, such processes are limited in speed, product application, the variety of the product design that may be desired, and the capability to rapidly change product design configurations produced by the same general apparatus. Examples of such prior art endless and rotary extrusion processes and techniques are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,964,789; 3,121,913 and 4,165,960.
There has been a long felt need in the continuous molding art for a high speed continuous scrapless molding technique that permits production of a wide range of products without sacrificing design considerations for the product to be produced. Such products may include an interconnected strip of gaskets, industrial seals, o-rings, filter materials and various other elongated structural and sheet-like molded products which can be continously produced either connected to or separate from one another during the molding operation, as may be desired.